In order to provide prompt and convenient service for customers, many companies have established customer support call centers. These centers provide one or more telephone numbers a customer can use to receive service and support information about various products. Typically, a customer experiencing a problem with or having a question about a particular product or service or having questions or difficulty installing or configuring a product or service will call the corresponding support center to receive specific information relating to the question or problem and preferably, instructions for resolving the problem.
However, these customer support call centers suffer from at least the following problems. First, staffing a call center with enough knowledgeable operators, also called agents or customer service representatives, to address a meaningful range of likely problems can be very expensive. The call center must hire enough agents to handle those times when most calls occur, or callers could have excessively long hold times before speaking to an agent. Long hold times are annoying to customers and hurt a company's reputation for providing quality customer service. Long hold times are an even bigger problem when the company does not provide a toll-free number and the caller is required to pay for the call. Thus, a call center might have more agents than needed at any given time with their associated costs.
Second, the time and cost required to train new agents is considerable and in some cases it could be weeks before an agent is allowed to answer a call on his own. Agents staffing the support center must be provided with the knowledge necessary to resolve common product and service related questions and problems. Often, because of the large scope of potential problems, it is simply not practical to impart the required information (i.e. the problem knowledge base) to each agent. For example, many of today's complex products require a team of engineers—each having a specialized area of expertise—to design, build, and service the products. Thus, a single person may not have all the information needed to solve a particular problem.
Third, the job of an agent is often very repetitive, and turnover can be high as agents lose interest in their work and quit their jobs. The most common customer support questions can represent up to 80% of all calls received. Turnover of 50% or greater is not unusual. For example, for a company with 100 agents experiencing 50% turnover, 50 agents would quit in a 12-month period. High turnover adds additional costs to the customer support call center for recruiting and training.
In an attempt to automate call centers, some companies have tried using prerecorded messages to provide answers to various common problems. Typically, a caller will hear simple audio recordings of portions of a spoken dialog that identify specific topics or problems. The caller is asked to press a certain key on his phone to identify the problem he is having. The caller will then hear another simple audio recording in the form of instructions for resolving a particular problem. These automated recordings are presented to the caller using what is called touch-tone Interactive Voice Response systems or IVR. Although the IVR instructions may resolve the aforementioned problems, the prerecorded solutions lack the flexibility to accept spoken inputs from the customer and tailor the response to the customer's specific situation. In addition, in order that the recordings be kept within a reasonable amount of time (since callers must memorize the instructions), the instructions may be simplified and generalized to such an extent that they do not provide sufficient help for the caller. Often, this results in unresolved problems and customer frustration.
In an IVR system, based on speech recognition technology, which implements a customer care service, for a given call-flow, the call may end in a defined final state (e.g. the caller successfully completes the call) or it may be prematurely interrupted. Typical reasons a call may be interrupted include a loss of connectivity, the caller requests to speak to a live operator, the caller hangs up, etc . . . . In any of those situations, the caller may choose to call back to: a) resume the previous service where he left off, in an attempt to complete it, or b) request a different service.
A common problem in traditional IVR systems is that repeat calls are processed without taking advantage of the knowledge of the outcome of the previous call from the same user. Because of this, callers always start the interaction from the beginning, as scripted, even if they have already performed several steps of it during a previous call. This common situation reduces customer satisfaction and unnecessarily increases call handling time for repeat callers. Moreover, the initial call of a repeat interaction may be wrongly classified as successfully solving the customer's problem, thereby affecting IVR call quality and performance evaluation and possibly call billing.